When roofing, it is common to make use of step flashing at an intersection of roofing material and adjacent vertical surfaces extending upwardly from the roof. Typical step flashing comprises two flanges of sheet metal which are joined along a fold line at right angles to one another such that one of the flanges can be received under the roofing material while the other flange can be sealed against the respective upright surface or overlapped by finishing materials on the upright surface.
As described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,681,613 by English, there exists many sheet metal bending tools in the prior art, however none are well suited for specifically forming step flashing from small blanks of sheet metal in a practical and efficient manner which does not occupy manufacturing time on larger bending tools better suited for manufacturing larger bent material.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,681,613 by English describes a chimney flashing fabrication tool which mainly comprises a channel arranged to receive one side edge of a sheet metal blank therein for folding the side edge upwardly to form one of the two flanges of the flashing. The folding requires the user to manually grasp a body of the tool to fold the sheet metal against a supporting surface. While use of the tool does permit larger bending equipment to be used for other purposes, the tool itself requires considerably manual effort on the part of the user to bend the sheet metal, while also requiring an awkward and time consuming manipulation of the tool to align a sheet metal edge with the channel in the tool for each flashing being formed. Accordingly the tool is inefficient for manufacturing large amounts of step flashings.